ASISKNOWN gives consumers a virtual boost
How can we bridge gaps between producers, trade facilities and consumers? Now the ASISKNOWN ('A semantic-based knowledge flow system for the European home textiles industry') project, which is backed by the EU with EUR 2.38 million in funding, is showcasing an integrated knowledge and content flow system that can fuel knowledge exchange and use across multimedia applications. ASISKNOWN is supported under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). According to the ASISKNOWN partners, the web tool, with the capacity to assess sales and design data from European home textile producers, distributors and retailers, is giving product development a boost and fuelling competiveness in the industry, both locally and abroad. Inter-organisational sales support and supply chain tools enhance activity. For example, with these tools, details of new orders will reach distributors and producers more rapidly, resulting in better supplier coordination, more efficiency and faster delivery times, as well as fewer stock cover days (reducing stock cover days ensures that stocks in the warehouse are kept at a minimum). The development of ASISKNOWN web-based Virtual Interior Designer tool allows customers to access product images directly from the databases of producers. This innovative feature gives customers the edge they need to design a room with just the click of a mouse. Everything that a room needs including carpets and wall paints can be viewed virtually. ASISKNOWN Smart Profiler tool also helps a retail associate introduce the customer's needs into the system and generates suggestions from available production information. This tool uses PROMOTE, an ontology-based knowledge management system to improve the searches of producers' databases. The researchers said ontological systems are able to search for concepts, not just key words. So if someone wants to search the database for 'winter shades', the system would generate a list of materials reflecting the colours blue, white, etc. Another cool feature is that the system is 'multilingual', showcasing lexicons in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Hungarian and Italian. The sour note on ontologies is that their development and maintenance are costly because of their immense scale. '[However] the vocabulary used in the home textiles sector is narrow enough to enable an ontology to deliver practical solutions,' explained Uschi Rick of Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen University in Germany, which is the coordinating body of ASISKNOWN. For his part, Kiril Simov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and lead developer of the ASISKNOWN ontology, said ASISKNOWN was able to take something that was very complex and deliver an intuitively understandable product to the user. 'It is difficult to present the information in a way that can be easily understood by the users, and it is difficult to build users' views into the domain,' Dr Simov was quoted as saying. Retailers, producers and distributors recognise the value of the tools developed by ASISKNOWN. 'ASISKNOWN can deliver to a typical small or medium-sized enterprise in the European home textiles industry the kind of market insight that was only available to the largest companies in the past,' Mr Rick commented.